March 17, 2005 | Read Time: 1 minute
A new online database makes it easy for nonprofit organizations to get information about federal spending and local statistics that might influence their work.
The National Priorities Project Database provides data from 1983 to the present in the categories of basic demographic information, education, health, housing, hunger, income and poverty, labor, and military, which can be searched by county or by state.
For example, people can search the database to find out that median household income in Illinois in 2002 ranged from $25,058 in Alexander County to $69,760 in Kendall County.
They can also learn that residents in Imperial County, Calif. — which has the highest percentage of children living in poverty of any county in the state — received almost one-third less money for low-cost housing, through a program known as Section 8, in 2003 than they did in 1993, when adjusted for inflation.
A service of the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit group in Northampton, Mass., the free site also offers tools that allow people to make graphs with the results of their searches, adjust the data for inflation, and save their searches to view again.
To get there: Go to http://database.nationalpriorities.org.
